A new paper I co-authored is online in Molecular Ecology.

  
Molecular Ecology just have published, as online early, the following paper I co-authored:

Allelic diversity for neutral markers retains a higher adaptive potential for quantitative traits than expected heterozygosity.

Ana Vilas, Andrés Pérez-Figueroa, Humberto Quesada and Armando Caballero

DOI: 10.1111/mec.13334  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mec.13334/abstract

This paper is part of Ana Vilas' PhD Thesis which I have co-supervised and she successfully defended last November. 

Here we address, both through simulation analyses and experimental studies with Drosophila melanogaster, the question of whether allelic diversity for neutral markers is a better indicator of a high adaptive potential than expected heterozygosity. Briefly, our results show that maximizing the number of alleles of a low number of markers implies higher responses to selection than maximizing their heterozygosity. We conclude that, when the number of markers available is small, the optimization of the number of alleles is the best method to create synthetic populations with the largest adaptive potential. Our results also support the use of neutral markers to make optimization decisions in conservation. 

A lot of work in these pages so it is cool to see them finally published in a prestigious journal as Molecular Ecology.